The Shame Campaign Against Our Troops

If you are facing a force that cannot be beaten on land, in the air, or at sea, what do you do?

You go after the mind.

You convince the enemy that their cause is corrupt, that their leaders are lying to them, and that their sacrifice is for nothing. You don’t need to defeat them physically if you can make the enemy stop believing in itself. In fact, if you can reach their fellow citizens as well, you don’t just lower the troops’ morale; you can even lower recruitment rates by convincing people not to join the fight.

I know how well the strategy works because I spent years telling young men not to join the military. I told people that our wars were not worth dying for, that the wars served Israel, and that no one should wear a uniform unless our homeland was attacked directly.

I believed that the Iraq War killed millions of people for Israel and the neocons. Although I never killed anybody, I still felt responsible for the war machine that did. But here’s the thing: we didn’t kill millions of people; that’s another lie told by anti-Americans.

The official narrative that sent me and my fellow Marines into Iraq was certainly stretched, but the truth is that Saddam was an evil man. He gassed his civilians at Halabja in 1988 and killed thousands of Kurds in a single afternoon. Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 and fired SCUDs at Israel and Saudi Arabia in 1991. He was a pariah that destabilized the region and left mass graves across his own country.

Unlike what most people think, regime change in Iraq was not something invented after 9/11. Toppling Saddam was US policy under Bill Clinton in 1998, five years before the invasion in 2003. That doesn’t justify the WMD claims, but what it means is that the story I told myself about my service for twenty years was built on one lie and a pile of truths.

That’s the mechanism that demoralization agents use: take one thing that’s actually true, build everything else on top of that, and then let shame do the rest.

The weapon operating on a national scale has a name and is used against us constantly. Political scientists call it “Vietnam syndrome”: the reluctance to use American military force after Vietnam. Although we killed hundreds of thousands of enemy troops, the objective to contain communism failed because we fought a war of attrition based on body count rather than holding ground and advancing to conquer the enemy. When we pulled out, leaving the South Vietnamese on their own and reducing our aid, they lost. It was a disaster not because we lost physically, but because we lost objectively—58,000 American lives, and for what?

Vietnam syndrome has had an effect ever since.

When Reagan went into Grenada in 1983, the operation was kept secret in part to prevent leaks that the press would label it “another Vietnam.” After the Gulf War in 1991, George H. W. Bush announced that the ghosts of Vietnam had been “laid to rest in the Arabian desert.” That treated a war that ended sixteen years earlier as something that still had to be exorcised. In 1993 the Clinton administration’s “lift and strike” plan for Bosnia died partly for the same reason.

I do want to clarify that Vietnam syndrome came out of a real defeat and objectives that America did not achieve. It was not a foreign intelligence psyop, but a homegrown resentment for the failure. Our enemies don’t have to always manufacture these things; all they need to do is find a wound that’s already there and press on it.

Which brings us to the war I served in.

Iraq did to my generation what Vietnam did to my father’s generation. Although we crushed Saddam’s army in weeks, we spent eight years occupying it, which cost us not only 4,400 American lives and wounding more than 30,000 but also trillions of dollars.

Whatever you think the Iraq War accomplished, Americans came out of it exhausted and suspicious.

Enemy intelligence agencies didn’t have to create war fatigue in America. America created war fatigue itself twice. All our enemies have to do now is to keep war fatigue high.

To do that, they take that war fatigue and add disinformation on top of it, which creates the perfect demoralization weapon. Convince the public that 9/11 was carried out by Israel and that October 7th was staged—a job to clear Gaza for beachfront property or for the Greater Israel project—and you can convince Americans that we shouldn’t be in the Middle East at all.

Think about how demoralizing these psyops can be: If 9/11 was an inside job, then the entire war against terrorism is a lie. All of the terrorists we eliminated were not bad guys but freedom fighters, and all of our troops died for nothing. If October 7th was an inside job, then Hamas didn’t do it, and Israel purposely killed its own people for Jared Kushner. If every American war since 1917 was fought for Jewish bankers, then no American has any reason to serve ever, and the recruiting problem solves itself.

Take all of this, and you make America the bad guy for the last century. Grandchildren are no longer proud of their grandparents. They look at our gorgeous uniforms the same way they look at a prisoner’s uniform—not a symbol of pride, but of what my old movement liked to call being a “Zogbot” slave. Every soldier, both active and inactive, becomes ashamed of their service or at least starts to doubt it.

As I have written elsewhere, Russia, China, and Iran run operations aimed at American audiences. They bypass our MSM by using alt-media and e-celebrities whose audiences already trust them. But they also receive an amount of help from people who are not being paid.

That was me.

No foreign government ever contacted me or ever sent me a dollar. I carried their message for fourteen years for free because I fell for all these anti-American psyops, and a man like me who’s already convinced is worth more than any trained agent. It’s why Russia Today, Press TV, and other foreign media loved to boost me on social media and their national media.

Now let’s deal with the reality of the situation, because I don’t want to dismiss the pacifist as a delusional fool, because they do have a good point.

When somebody tells you that none of America’s wars directly protect the homeland, you don’t have to disagree with them, because they’re right, since almost none of them do. To pretend otherwise is to be dishonest and lose the argument in an instant.

The truth is very simple: nobody today is drafted. Every person who joins the military does so voluntarily in exchange for a set of benefits: training, pay, education, a home loan, a career, and a claim on this country that lasts the rest of their life. In exchange, you will accept that the job might actually kill you. Most jobs carry some chance you die by accident, but this one carries a chance that somebody kills you on purpose; everyone who signs the contract knows that on the day they sign it.

Signing up is a personal choice that someone makes weighing the risks and the rewards. Most people come back home in one piece, while others come home broken or never come home at all.

So yes, our troops serve America’s interests rather than only its borders—all of them. That’s what a superpower’s military does, and it’s what ours has done since becoming a superpower. Protecting our interests around the globe is what maintaining that status requires. Whether any particular war was worth fighting is a different argument, and I’m not going to settle it here. I’m talking about the bigger picture.

But “they died for special interests” is not that argument. What about all the men who died on a construction site for some building that didn’t need to be built? What about the ones who died on a fishing boat or in a car factory for something nobody’s survival depended on? We don’t tell their families those lives were spent on nothing.

A superpower like us needs citizens to choose to do hard and dangerous jobs—the military is one of them. Thus, the purpose of these shame campaigns is to get those people to hate that job, quit that job, or never sign up for it so the machine breaks itself from the inside, without the enemy needing to take a hammer to it.

This gives our enemies, who want our superpower status, the advantage, and we can’t afford to give it to them.

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